What are ways to begin sentences that aren’t one of the following?
[ol][li]The noun verbs things.[/li]
[li]Pronoun/Character name verbs stuff.[/li]
[li]Prepositional phrase, noun verbs, such as “If it wasn’t for that horse, I wouldn’t have went to college.”[/li][/ol]
I try hard to avoid too many of the first two, but this leads to me overusing prepositional phrases.
So how can I structure the sentences to vary them more?
Imperative verbs for dialogue or a first person narrative. “Listen carefully and you can hear the moles plotting underground.”
Well Dialogue is easy. I mean in like, the narrative. Describing things and actions and things moving forwards and such.
There’s lots of ways to sprinkle adjectives (and adjective phrases) and adverbs (and adverb phrases) into the standard “noun verbs” sentence beginning. While overloading sentences with adjectives can get old quite fast, adjective phrases and clauses (like “the man of many mysteries” or “the man who visits Starbucks every morning”) can be used to great affect.
There’s also a variety of different clauses or phrases you could use prior to introducing the subject, such as “If it is past five o’clock, I will…” or “Making his way across the road, the chicken…”
Although it’s rare (and mostly confined to poetry), English does permit the “Verb-Subject-Object” structure.
Another structure I’ve been introduced to recently is starting with a list, such as “Apples, bananas, oranges–I need to pick each of those up from the grocery today.”